Polaroid X530 first world
review
Polaroid x530 is the second digital camera - after Sigma, with SD9, SD10, SD14, (SD15) models - where has been mounted the X3 Foveon multilayer photodiodes sensor. You can see here, the first pictures, taken at various ASA values and compressions, where you can immediately detect the peculiar details sharpness produced by this revolutionay chip. See hereunder a full review.
The pupae are growing very fast since the eggs were laid 20 days ago and their sturdy mother wasp, is here on guard mode. Click on the picture to get the Tiff file.
The second wasp picture was taken with flash on, but I had to muffle it with a thick cotton band. In macro mode the flash always burns out the subject. In portrait mode the overexposure comes out if you do not to choose the proper light metering setting (multiple/center/spot)..
I'm
sure I won't go too far away saying that this camera - made in China, well built, sturdy (as
the wasp) and with a nice grip - has got a Ferrari engine inside it; if light
conditions are ideal, no camera - in its range of price, or more - can be near
to rival the details of Foveon X3 chip.
Having said this, I will have
to list some handicaps, and I will begin with the minor ones.
Getting out the SD card with your fingers is difficult: once I had to use
tweezers to extract it.
The lens cap hasn't got a firm grip on the lens barrel to which is
attached by a nylon wire, so it falls always down with a minimal pressure: the
result is that you have this cumbersome piece of plastic disturbing you
while taking pictures. The cap could be useful only when you put the camera in
your knapsack, even if the lens are already protected by hardwared camera iris cap. I
would also prefer having, beside the neck strap, a small strap; this camera is
not a heavy reflex, therefore can be hand hold without fatigue for some time.
The camera does not memorize the LCD diplay brightness, so everytime you
turn the camera on you have to readjust it, because the display it is not so
bright in the default centered value. The possibility to give more light to the
diplay should be hardwared near the display or the wasp you are aiming at - 2 cm
far from from the lens, and 15 from your nose - will have already blown up your
face with painful punctures while you look for the menus to give maximum light
to the display; moreover the display gets hot with long usage, not so hot to
burn your fingers, but this is a sympthom that the camera will begin to fail to
focus with any mode: portrait, landscape, sport or auto. I had to extract the
battery and reset it while taking pictures of soccer amateurs which I will post
later on.
The camera often seems uncertain in focusing; in Sport mode for example
you won't get the scene you had pointed to, as the camera will linger on
focusing. It seems to be not a "point and shoot camera" as you have to
ponder before doing it: am I in the right mode? Have I choosen the right light
metering setting?(and you have to do some fingering to get it): see, for example,
the model picture, out of focus with Auto focusing on: using a Sanyo J1, if you
are on Auto focus, a portrait will result in focus. Moreover the manual focus is
so sluggish that you prefer not to use it.
The flash always burns out, in macro mode, all the subjects, even if you
give a minus 2 value exposure: for shooting the second flash aided wasp picture
I had to muffle it with a thick cotton band. In macro mode you need a lot of
depth which you can have only if you can intervene on lens aperture, feature
which was not conceived for this camera, but much needed as the camera, most
times, chooses to shoot at full aperture, even if this wouln't be the case; say
in a portrait chooses 2,7 and
1/800th; moreover the ASA speed lacks the 50 value, which would increase the
already fabulous details sharpness. I would also add a hotspot in order to
utilize a more powerful external flash, justified by the possibility to print
large prints because of the "generous" 25 Mbytes Tiff(Tagged Image
File Format) dimension.
Movie: I would have expected to find a 640x480 30fps; instead you find
the speediest frame only on the 320x240 mode. The real point, anyway, is not even
this one, but the quality of the movie. Even if is more saturated, more detailed
and more "natural" than the Sanyo J1 camera movie, (see the two
compared shootings) it looks like as you see the scene through a mesh.
Foveon X3 chip, if the theory is right, should rival not only cameras of which I
am sure (if well assited by other camera components) but even 3CCD professional
videocamera: so I do not understand why there is this problem. Also in a 400 ASA
shot a certain amount of green
pixels or speckles appeared in a dark
area; this problem was suggested by Ron
Parr.
Many times - I had it for only one week - I had to get out the battery as
the camera went bust after choosing a series of modes in a quick pace. Many
times the pictures have been overexposed, as, if you don't choose the correct
Light metering setting (multiple/center/spot) it's enough to aim a little bit
out of range mode - say for example in the spot mode - to have the picture
overexposed; seems that the three modes are very strict in defining the relevant
areas: on this theme I will post a couple of example. I would have had more of
them, but the files are so large - as I said before - more than 6MB in X3F
resolution, which when converted in Tiff would become a whopping 25MB; so while
viewing the files with Polaroid Photolab - you can't view the X3F picture
resolution with other program, except the other 4 jpg compression modes - I was
deleting the out of focus and the overexposed to spare disk space in my almost
saturated computer.
Anyway, I firmly believe in this new Foveon technology and I must say
that I had the pleasure to test it. In the end, a picture so detailed as the
sunflower or the dog or the wasp (in this case, in the focused area) are
unbeateable. The consumer should
not be deterred (when all issues will be solved) by the mere 1,5
real pixels camera:
first because they are 1,5 real pixels , second because the correspondent file
Tiff is, I repeat again, a huge 29Mb or more.
This was the only camera sample available in Italy (the other two x530,
are being tested, in France and Germany), so we will wait and see if
the issues appeared in the camera I had, will surface on the other
samples. For certain, a praise goes to Polaroid (WWL
Italia
is the retailer for Italy) which has choosen to mount this chip on this camera.
One wonders: why Kodak hasn't done it before, or other minor, but very
well known camera makers? The idea is winning; needs to be refined.
Click on the picture to download the 3,4 Mb file, clik here to download Tiff sunflower picture (25,9 MB)
Polaroid x530 body
Two big compared movies 640x480 15fps: Polaroid x530 versus Sanyo J1 (about 30MB each). Before shooting, the two cameras had been mounted side by side on a wooden board, in order to point at the same scene.
Here a series of two pictures at various ASA speed(100/200/400); click inside each picture to get the original 1420x1060.
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The pictures, movies and texts appearing on www.testiweb.com have been shot by Bruno Castrovinci. Utilize them for personal purpose only or contact the author for commercial use.
